Yup. Showing up is basically always a thing, because even if it’s not an official channel, you’ll end up bothering someone until they help you solve the problem.

And I think most people want to help others, but even if they’re selfish and don’t care about helping anyone, they’ll help you if you’re persistent and physically present.

Like the classic parable of the persistent widow: Luke 18:2-5

“He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man. 3 And there was a widow in that city who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Give me justice against my adversary.’ 4 For a while he refused, but afterward he said to himself, ‘Though I neither fear God nor respect man, 5 yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice, so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.’”

I guess this is one critique of exclusive remote working: it’s pretty easy to end up ghosted by someone in the approval chain for something.

If you have a moment, please call the IRS' Customer Advocacy Department to file a complaint regarding this. Gotta be the squeaky wheel.

https://www.irs.gov/advocate/the-taxpayer-advocate-service-i...

This reminds me of dealing with immigration. I was supposed to get an “alien registration number” when I arrived in the USA on an immigrant via, yet for some reason I did not.

No one would talk to me, not matter how many times I explained for three months. I eventually took to driving to the INS building every single day until they finally gave up and issued me a number within 20 minutes.

Three months of not being allowed to work nor being able to leave the country was frustrating in the extreme.

Anyway, apparently the right way to deal with this is to contact your representative (for me it was a congressman or senator, for this guy their state-level person) and ask them to help.

In 2017 I had a problem with back taxes and the IRS was threatening to come after me. I couldn’t get them on the phone and it was important enough that I didn’t want to wait to resolve it via mail. I contacted my US congressperson and complained that they were making it impossible to work out an arrangement, and the fact that I wanted to give them money & couldn’t call them was ridiculous. A senior aide got back to me pretty quickly, and offered to help. Instead of relying on snail mail and nonfunctional phone calls, I was able to resolve the entire process via email and a couple phone calls with the aide. It was great, and I highly recommend giving it a try.

Contact your senior U.S. Senators office. They have contacts that will get things moving for you.

Works much more often that you would expect.

Same thing with Global Entry. Partner was stressed because it expired, no appoints, etc. Flew through a location w/ Global Entry and went there at open, in and out in 15 min; poof, TSA PRE worked next day.

I am in exactly this situation (but at the days/weeks timescale instead of months), so thanks for posting how you resolved this, I'll try my local IRS office.

I'm dealing with similar issues regarding a lost package through the USPS. The sender assured me they had updated my address but sent it to the old one anyway and then got lost.

I filled out the online form for missing packages and it said someone would follow up on the ticket number. No one did. I called the main USPS number and got through to an operator. They said someone should have followed up and then created a new ticket number. Still no follow up.

I called again and they gave me the number for some major customer affairs center (forget the name). First time the voicemail was full, second time I left a message but never heard back.

The local post office finally did call me back ... from an Unknown number (WTF?) so I didn't pick it up, then left a vague message about the package and said to call back the local post office number.

Every time I've tried to call that number it just stays on hold and then goes to a busy signal.

In this case he's saying

> since I cannot sort this out in person due to the COVID closures

...which I interpret as "the office I would go to to sort this out is empty; there is nobody there; the lights are off and the doors are locked. Everyone who would be working there is working from home."

IANAL but I mean if they say the way to notify them is to call them, and they don't respond to that call, the onus is on them, no?

I would think that you did your due diligence by calling and that it's their fault at that point.

Also, calling should never be a requirement. What if someone is deaf? Requiring someone to call without an online alternative should 100% be an ADA violation.

That's why I'll never use a virtual bank, I need one with branches just for that time something breaks.

This is good advice.

That said, you shouldn't have to call up a politician and beg in order to get government departments to perform functions that they are supposed to be performing.

If you have some ultra-edge case involving your deceased uncle's estate's something or other it can be understandable. But this should be a routine business transaction and the city is incapable of making it happen. He's trying to give them a large amount of money FFS, you'd think they'd accept it and then do the menial amount of work to make the records on their end reflect that.

This is why I think that if there has to be an unfixable Kafkaesque bureaucracy, I'd rather it be in the public sector rather than a monopoly in the private sector.

There is not much your local councilman / state rep / US Rep / US Senator / etc can do about a problem with Comcast. But I've seen appeals to elected officials fix lots of issues with government bureaucracy.

I just had an issue where I couldn’t get an appointment for a city service because of COVID, got ahold of my councilman and was there in 2 weeks. This is definitely what he should do.

One important thing to note is that in the over 9 years I have held a DCA license for repair, they have never

a) checked my soldering skills b) looked to see whether I got dust between the LCD cell & backlight layers when doing screen replacement c) checked to see what quality of iPhone screens we use for screen repairs d) asked or tested my ability to do my job

You pay the troll toll, and you get a paper that goes on your wall. I could be the best tech in the world, or I could be a giant idiot... you'd never know.

Some people have the mistaken impression that being licensed means I have been tested, inspected, etc.. nope. They inspect to make sure your business cards have your license number on them. They don't inspect to figure out if you actually do good work for your customers.

It sounds like the people who issue licenses need a professional license!

More seriously though: Rossmann's troubles are in the domain of business licenses, a licensing system that sounds too complex, staff that are not properly trained in the services they provide (or are incompetent for other reasons), and likely under-staffing in the departments he interacts with. My interpretation is this is more damning of the city itself than the principle of licensing.

I think I'm the typical person you're inviting to say it and I will: those are acceptable losses. Whenever you want a new licensing scheme, you have to balance the gains with the losses.

For example, my city had an issue where donation boxes would pop up on city lots next to parks and become dumpsters. The city implemented a licensing scheme, which forced the companies and non-profits to collect from the boxes at a regular frequency, and now the problem is solved. No bags of old books left soaking in the rain turning into useless pulp. But someone could argue the licensing scheme stops some non-profits from collecting much needed donations. It totally does, but it's worth it.

Well, two different things can be true at the same time. Also, this seems less a problem with licenses and more a problem with getting and renewing them. Which are two related but different issues.

> advocate for more professional license requirements in some other comment thread.

How in the world is this now a comment on the validity of licensing services? An organization has bad customer service so you should throw the entire field out?

I know someone who was on hold with an airline for hours, should we dismantle airlines? Is notoriously impossible to get google on the phone, should we scrap search engines and online advertising?

This post is simply looking for an reason to push a personal point.

> You can't have the good without the bad

This is not a rational claim. Yes, you certainly can have the good without the bad. The existence of a process doesn't imply its brokenness.

Before running to a lawyer he should at least send a paper letter. Skip this email and phone BS. Certified, Return Receipt, signature required. Even a lack of response is still documented. Right now it's just he said/she said. And if it does get to the legal level, having an official and actionable paper trail is a lot stronger than "they haven't answered one email in 9 years". A judge isn't going to care about that (right or wrong is irrelevant - email is not as actionable of communications in business vs. mailed correspondence.)

If they still don't respond to a letter like that and it bounces back from the post office then you really have something for an attorney to start with. Attorneys are expensive - do the basics first before engaging one (if you have to).

And no, engaging an attorney does not automatically = a lawsuit. Quite the opposite, actually.

Unfortunately, the hard truth, in America at least, is you have to hire a lawyer for these problems. Most such problems magically disappear that way. It's unfair, but it's how it works. It's a lot like needing to bribe an official to get something done: if you don't understand, the system seems impenetrable.

Right — a lawsuit is the pretty much the only thing that must be answered.

Why is this being downvoted? It seems like perfectly reasonable advice and one of the first things that came to my mind as well. Is there something in the video that happens which is causing people to vote this down?

Edit: instead of silently voting me down too I encourage someone to provide thoughtful written discourse expressing your disagreement so we can all grow and learn together

How long would it take to have this resolved in court? Courts that are backlogged due to Covid? What's a business owner supposed to do while this goes through the courts?

And obviously, how much is it going to cost?

Agreed. Sue the city. That will get someones attention. Well, maybe not in NYC. I honestly don't know.

This the right answer unfortunately that is downvoted without explanation.

That's not even a regulation problem per se, it's a bureaucracy issue. The only regulation here is that you need to get a piece of paper to do business. There's no complex requirement, no job-specific rules to follow, no training requirement, nothing except a piece of official paper.

Some jobs in some places may have onerous requirements for some jobs, possibly for good reason, such as having a doctorate to perform medicine, which takes a decade of hard work or so. The bureaucracy involved may be simple, you're supposed to have the diploma: if you're found to have performed medical acts without it you end up in jail. (This is not typically how it's done any more for a number of good reasons, incidentally.)

Getting a simple piece of paper is the problem. As far as regulations are concerned, this is not any more complex than buying a concert ticket. If the festival you wanted to attend turned out to be unable to do that in a timely manner, you wouldn't fault them for selling tickets. You'd fault them for sucking at a simple business task.

In other videos (especially for the prior license issue about resell of used goods vs. the repair license) he does seem to talk to lawyers who are familiar with the city rules but has reported not having great avenues to success. The problem seems genuinely tied to some parts of the city government still assessing fees/fines/so forth, but the COVID rules are preventing escalation/remedy in person in a meaningful way and the only way to get traction is to do so. The general vibe he's been putting out across the last couple months is just that he's feeling like he's getting shook down since in his perspective he's holding his end of the bargain with paying for licenses yet can't get the city to hold theirs.

I remember him saying in another video that NYC is going to become basically a ghost town in a couple decades if this kind of behavior from the government (along with its failure to fix the real estate problems) keeps up. It's curious to wonder if that is accurate. Only time will tell I suppose

Not every city is like this. Rich cities that can systematically screw people and get away with it are like this because business like this one aren't a large enough overall part of their revenue stream for them to care about.

Poor cities can't systematically marginalize small business without hurting themselves enough to be held accountable so they don't generally do this kind of thing or when they do they fix the system quickly.

I remember seeing a video by Louis, where he talked about speaking to a lawyer. He was told to pay a fine, instead of going through the legal trouble. It would be both easier and cost him less, because it would probably happen again, and then he would have to lawyer up again.

Why would you move from a city in which your skills are in high demand, and you already have a rolodex of clients with whom you have established a relationship? The relocation benefits have to be obscene to counter that glorious opportunity.

As long as New Yorkers still exist in their dense millions, service providers will always appear to fill a market need, even when they have to jump hoops (to a point). NYC knows this. China knows this.

Yes, but he's also made numerous videos about how he makes less than a pittance of income from YouTube. Yes, the doom-scrolling applies here, but he's from New York originally and you can tell the amicus is how a place he grew up in is still going down-hill.

I was in NYC for all of covid and can confirm that Fox News is full of it when it comes to "rampant crime in NYC" however it's not a perfectly rosy picture either in terms of the recovery of small business and character of the city.

Unfortunately, a lot of first-time entrepreneurs don't know these things and register wherever they live. And even if you register in another state, you still have to abide by NYS/NYC rules if you operate in those regions.

To wit, CA charges $800 PER YEAR to have an LLC. For many small one person LLCs, that $800 a year makes a big difference. $8,000 over a decade.

City or state government?

My least favorite Mass. business experience this year was the complete fuckup with the Dept of Unemployment Assistance solvency fund. My DUA tax rate went from 2.5% to 7.5%. Frigging legislature and state government had no clue that this was coming, and left small businesses like mine swinging in the wind.

https://www.masslive.com/politics/2021/04/some-massachusetts...

But frankly this is nothing compared to doing business with the U.S. government through bids. Never, ever, ever attempting that again.

You didn't at the time. The reason we got flagged was because we started talking to insurers about adding a policy at one point in anticipation of hiring.

Somewhat off-topic: do you know of any good resources to read about these sorts of requirements for NYC or the US more broadly?

Most sites gloss over these sorts of legal requirements.

And the best part is - the citizens (who are impacted by this directly or indirectly) are paying for this.

When people say reduce the size of the government they're not saying just get rid of the people who can issue the permits. They're saying to get rid of the permits altogether. You shouldn't need the government's permission to fix computers.

Except for it's NYC which means I can assure you the people in power love government and would love more of it and think they're actually doing a good job.

I think what you get in places with limitless opportunity like NYC is the people attracted to government are either not able to cut it in a city like NYC (hence why government employees there are generally incompetent and indifferent) or see the immense wealth as something they can latch on to and exploit to satisfy their hunger for power over other people.

Currently (2021-07-12, 14:46 BST) the description is nothing but 3 other YouTube links.

It's in the comments.

I don’t think this is true. At least on iOS I only see links to more videos in the description.

There isn't

It's in the pinned comment at the top.

No, having worked with others going through the same issue -- the NYC beauracracy for local businesses is truly broken and terrifying for small time operators.

They are typically the main group of people who enforce laws in NYC, and operating a business without a license sounds like something they’d come in quick to shutdown. They were also the ones who originally came to his place to handle a separate ‘incident’ that he was fined for that he discussed for several minutes in his video. So instead of waiting for them to come by and find an excuse to shut him down or fine him again, it’s better to have written communication with the precinct captain to fall back on that explains his case.

I watch Louis' channel often, but I don't recall him mentioning what his employees think (only that they exist). For all we know, they might be as fed up with NYC as Louis is.